29 SHOUT S AND MURMURS LADY WITH A PEAR.L R EADERS of these encyclicals may recall that recently there was set forth here the tale of a motorIst slowing up on the Old Ore- gon Trail to offer a lift to an aged woman trudging along in the twilight with a market basket on her arm. She had deposited it gratefully on the back seat and was about to get in herself when he stepped on the gas and, leav- ing his would-be passenger staring after him in something of a pet, drove twenty miles before feeling free to examine that basket. [t contained a loaded auto- matic. What had prompted him to this seemingly ungracious behavior was the glimpse of a trouser cuff beneath the hem of Granny's Mother Hubbard. The incident was new to ll1e, but in passing it on to you, please remem bel', I voiced at the time a suspicion that it was a rootless story already irrevocably afloat on the stream of folklore. Well, , it seems I was right about that. Indeed, from the freshet of elicited testimony, I now gather that Granny has of late years been revealing that telltale trouser cuff in every State of the Union. The details differ. Sometimes the incriminat- ing legs are reflected in the windshield as Granny tries to tuck them up out of sight. When she was foiled by a Detroit ll1an on the road to M t. Clemens recently, she had no basket but a battered suitcase, filled, as it turned . out, with pistols and blackjacks. Out- side of Pittsburgh the bogus old girl was toting not only this injurious hard- ware but $150,000 in stolen bonds. In Atlanta, where the story has heen com- ing rhythmically to light about four times a year, it in variably happens on the road to Miami, and always the fraudulent pedestrian wears a crumpled nurse's uniform. In the heyday of the Florida madness, when all Americans who could make a down payment on a Ford were starting south, my col- league on the Atlanta Journal, Peggy Mitchell Marsh, finally came to the bewildering and embittering conclusion that everyone of them had, at one time or another, incautiously offered a ride to that nurse in the crumpled uniform. With these curious stories, which travel across country by word of mouth and have as their single common factor the habit of always being credited either to a cousin or, at very least, to a lifelong friend of the speaker, it is difficult to doubt that each had a beginning somewhere, sometime, in an actual occurrence. In my own fi t- ful researches in to the origins of a dozen indisputable folk tales, I have only once got back to what I thought was an authentic beginning. But that is another story. In this instance I have traced the spurious beldame back only fi fty years, to an evening in the Parish of Trinity, on the sweet Isle of Jersey, w hen Captain Perchard, late of Angrés Manor, was driving along in his dog- cart at sunset and offered a lift to a bandit masquerading as an old woman with a large basket on her head. It, too, proved to be, as the doughty Cap- tain discovered., Granny's personal ar- senal. ^ LL of this has been brought to n mind by a letter from Arthur Bergman, of 225 \Vest End Avenue, this city, who tells Ine that recently a young girl walking on the beach of a Jersey resort found what she thought was a pearl, put it in her mouth for safekeeping, swallowed it unintention- ally while in the surf, forgot about it, and a few weeks later developed such visible s}'Inptoms as led her parents to decide that she had been, as the phrase goes-a singularly exigent phrase, it has always seemed to me-no bettêr than she should have been. Any- way, they sent her packing. At a hospital the desperate girl swore to her innocence, and a skeptical physician ordered X -rays taken. These revealed an octopus in full, tentacular, and to me anatomically puzzling, possession of her abdominal cavity. "There is no hope for her now," says Mr. Bergman with a faint note of relish, "it is too late to do anything. The girl is now lying in a hospital in Trenton, N.J., in horrible pain, await- ing death-nineteen years ald." If I receive these dire tidings with a certain calm, it is born of the fact that agitated letters have been bringing ll1e the latest news of this selfsame pearl at short intervals for five years past. I have found Harvard medical students agog over the plight of a Boston girl who had unwittingly incubated a devil- . fish acquired at Hyannis. I have notes on an octopus thus misplaced as the result of a girlish romp on Winthrop Beach, near Boston. Another wide- eyed talemonger makes investigation costly and difficult by shifting the scene to "one of the less frequented islands" in the South Seas. One girl-a stenog- rapher-was put out into the night by her stern \Vall Street employer as the result of a pearl swallowed at Budd Lake, N.J., and all that she had hatched, as it turned out, was a six- foot water snake. As the story moves inland, the pearl disappears from the scenario, the egg is acquired by careless drinking at unfamiliar pools and springs, and the octopi yield grudgingly to snakes of. all descriptions: rattlesnakes sometimes, but usually water moccasins. To me the most interesting aspect of the legend is the fact that never, by any chance, is the pearl picked up by a boy. Even when the victim is an un- suspect tot of six, it is always a girl. 'rhen, I have had only one instance reported in which the reluctant host recovered. My saIne cherished corres- pondent in Atlanta tells me that once an old mammy did succeed where the doctors had faiJed. The mammy advised starving the victim, who, this time, was an Atlanta miss possessed of a water ll10ccasin. Of course the snake ate what she ate or went without. The unwel- come fast put hiln into quite a tempest and he thrashed about a lot. After a week of this, Mammy dropped one drop of sweet milk down the girl's throat. In an hour another went down. " I f " d orget, says my correspon ent, "ho\ l long this process went on, but can probably find out should you ever swallow a snake and need the prescrip- tion. Finally, the snake, tormented by the few drops and naturally inquisitive as to their source, crawled up the girl's gullet, thereby coming within reach, so that he was clutched by the intrepid mammy and killed." It is also patiently explained to me that Mammy found it easier to scotch the reptile because it was blind from too long confinement in a habitat with inadequate lighting facilities. -ALEXANDER W OOLLCOTT